"David Moody - Straight to You" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moody David)

however, was far from impressed.
At only twenty-six years of age, he had done well to get to where he sat today. It had taken him eight
years to work his way up through the ranks of the company which employed him from a mere clerk to
the heady heights of an office manager. Now, as he sat alone and uncomfortable in the stilling heat of his
oak-panelled office and rested in his expensive leather swivel chair, he wondered if it had been worth all
the effort it had taken.
Steven looked out of the wide window next to his desk and down onto the busy high street below.
With jealous eyes he watched people chatting, laughing, shopping and enjoying themselves and he cursed
the concrete prison cell into which he locked himself for a minimum of seven hours every working day.
Sometimes he wondered if he would have been better off without the burden of responsibility which had
been hung on his shoulders at a relatively young age. Although not a lonely man by any stretch of the
imagination, he would often listen to the laughter and jokes which drifted through the air from the main
office and into his room, and curse the professional distance that his superiors insisted he maintain from
the people who worked for him.
He also found it difficult to relax and to cast aside the stresses that his job involved, and the heat of
the last two weeks had only made matters worse. As a single man, Steven went home each night to an
empty house where the only listening ear belonged to the cat and, while the animal did its best and
listened to his problems, it was useless when it came to offering support and encouragement. Although he
never made any admissions to his friends or family, he was desperately in need of someone to share his
time, his money, his problems and his life with.
Perhaps he was being naive, but he made no effort to go out and find such a person. He had been the
victim of too many broken hearts and missed opportunities to spend his nights trudging around lonely
bars and crowded clubs anymore. Brought up on a diet of other peoples sickly sweet love stories,
Steven was sure that all he needed to do was wait patiently and then, one day, the girl of his dreams
would come waltzing into his life.
Even with the large window open, the heat in the office was sticky and close. He loosened the tie
around his neck and undid the top button on his formal, pressed white shirt. He glanced up at the clock
on the wall in front of him and sighed heavily as its hands quickly worked their way around towards two
o'clock. Two o'clock on the afternoon of Monday the 15th had been a time and a date that he had not
been looking forward to. It had been decided by those in the higher echelons of power that one of the
junior members of the office staff had not been performing to the fullest of his abilities and, unfortunately,
this was the time and date when it had fallen to Steven to deliver the company's ultimatum to their
struggling employee. As the second hand on the clock ticked mercilessly past the hour, he took a deep
breath and picked up the phone.
With the receiver held tightly in his hand, Steven swallowed hard and dialled out to his secretary at her
desk. If he was honest, he didn't believe that Ian Stanton (the member of staff that he was about to
reprimand) had done anything to merit such action being taken but what troubled him more than being the
hired mouthpiece of a man in a grey suit in an office on the other side of the country, was the fact that he
was about to admonish one of the most popular members of staff. He felt sure that it would only serve to
alienate him further from the rest of the people in the branch. Still, he thought, there was no avoiding it, it
was what he was being paid to do.
The thought of money depressed Steven and, as the phone rang in the outside office without answer,
he could not help but think and be saddened by how much he had become a willing slave to cash. He
was about to do something that he did not believe in and the only reason that he did it was to keep those
few extra pounds flowing into his pockets at the end of each month. To stop them soiling their own
hands, his superiors paid him a little more than the staff beneath him and expected that to be sufficient.
The company that Steven worked for was part of the financial industry and he could see better than
most just how the possession of money seemed to command more respect that it ever deserved. He
would often spend the best part of a day running around on behalf of those people who either had cash
or connections while the people who really needed his help had to wait in a poverty-stricken line at the